Announcement Calenda 1237502
The main aim of this project is to compare the modern philosophy of Bildung and the contemporary paradigm of the Learning Society by systematically analyzing their homological structures. Through this comparison, we seek to expose the conceptual mutations that have operated, from one paradigm to the other, on the ideal of educational autonomy.
In disciplinary terms, this project lies at the intersection of the history of modern philosophy and contemporary political philosophy. It is structured along four main lines:
- Historical reconstruction of the texts devoted to the concept of Bildung in classical German philosophy, by establishing an original typology of the contrasting positions of the main authors of this period (Herder, Mendelssohn, Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Humboldt), according to the way they conceptualize the dialectic of educational autonomy and, in particular, the way they theorize the political and cultural missions of the University in their conceptions of the emancipatory project of Bildung.
- Identification and analysis of the most significant interpretations, critiques and transformations of the concept of Bildung in Marx (allseitige Verwirklichung), Mill (self-development), Nietzsche (Zucht) and Dewey (growth), to highlight the main theoretical divergences on the conditions for a partial reactivation of the modern emancipatory project of Bildung.
- Building up a corpus of scientific and political texts and discourses on the Learning Society, with a view to restoring the political philosophy underlying them and comparing it with the philosophy of Bildung, following an analytical grid identifying the conceptual and normative homologies and mutations between the two paradigms.
- Testing the concrete relevance of this comparison and the critical potential of Bildung in the context of contemporary mutations of the Idea of the University, by mapping the most important philosophical critiques of its mutations and philosophical conceptions and theorizations of academic freedom.
Through an analysis of the two politico-educational paradigms of the Bildung and the Learning Society, we will seek to examine whether the great narrative of philosophical modernity, the ideal of emancipation through self-formation, has become utterly obsolete and impotent today in the context of the knowledge economy, or whether, and to what extent, it continues to be operative in current discourses, in critical and fragmentary forms.
